At the end of November 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald felt dizzy while in Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. He had had a heart attack and was ordered by his doctor to rest in bed, where he was able to write on a board for a couple of hours a day. Since his own apartment on North Laurel Avenue was on the top floor, he moved to the apartment of his friend and lover, the columnist Sheilah Graham, on North Hayworth Avenue. He believed that he was making a good recovery, writing to his wife Zelda, then in a mental hospital, on December 13:
The novel is about three-quarters through and I think I can go on till January 12 without doing any stories or going back to the studio. I couldn’t go back to the studio anyhow in my present condition as I have to spend most of the time in bed where I write on a wooden desk. . . . The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing itself but it will be a gradual process that will take some months. It is odd that the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.
The day after writing this letter, he drew up a schedule that called for him to write 1,750 words a day on the novel we now call The Last Tycoon, though he had not finally settled on a title. The schedule called for him to complete a working draft by January 15.
Although Fitzgerald continued to work steadily until his death, he was wrong in his optimistic assessment about the condition of his heart. Chronic alcoholism tends to produce an enlargement of the heart chambers, which can be fatal, and Fitzgerald had other maladies as well. He had tubercular flare-ups, and the indications are that he produced excessive amounts of insulin, which would explain his inordinate craving for candy and soft drinks.
In her last memoir of Fitzgerald, Sheilah Graham recalls that during the night of December 19-20 he slept badly, pacing the floor of her apartment during a large portion of the night. In the morning he explained that “It’s the chapter. I can’t make it hang together.” That day, while Miss Graham was interviewing Spencer Tracy at the studio for her newspaper column, Fitzgerald worked on episode seventeen of the novel, the meeting between his protagonist, Monroe Stahr, and the Communist labor organizer, Brimmer. Later that day, after she had returned to the apartment, Fitzgerald “came beaming into the living room” and “announced ‘I’ve been able to fix it.’” She describes him as exhilarated. “‘Baby, this book will be good.’” They decided to celebrate with dinner at Lyman’s, a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, and then went to a preview of This Thing Called Love, a comedy starring Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas. Miss Graham recalls that when the lights went on and they started to leave the theater, Fitzgerald stumbled; she held his arm, and outside he breathed heavily. As he drove her home he told her, “I had the same dizziness as that time in Schwab’s.” His doctor was due to call the next day, so he took his usual medicines and went to bed.
The next morning, after sleeping late and dressing around noon, he seemed much better, and he and Miss Graham planned to eat some sandwiches she had bought at a delicatessen. “I settled into the sofa with a biography of Beethoven,” Miss Graham recalls. “To reinforce the book, I asked Scott if it was all right for me to play the Eroica on the record player. . . . Scott smiled and sank into the dark green armchair with the latest Princeton Alumni Weekly, focusing on an article about football.” A few minutes later,
Scott stood up and said, “I want something sweet, I’m going to Schwab’s for some ice cream.”
“But the doctor is coming soon,” I reminded him. “I’m sure he’ll have some good news about your heart. Will a Hershey bar do?” I went to the drawer in my bedroom where I had put it for later munching and gave it to Scott. He savored it slowly while, as I found out later, writing down the nicknames of football heroes of his class opposite their names in the magazine. We both looked up at the same time and smiled at each other while he licked his fingers, and then we settled back to the reading. A few minutes later, while the Eroica shrilled its prophecy, I half saw Scott jump to his feet and clutch the mantelpiece as though to steady himself. He would often stand up suddenly when he had an idea for some writing. Or was it the dizziness again? Before I could reach him, he fell to the floor, spread-eagled on his back. His eyes were closed and he was breathing heavily.
Miss Graham tried to pour some brandy through his clenched teeth, but by the time the doctor arrived, he was dead.
Fitzgerald was thus a victim of his third heart attack at age forty-four. But if there is much in this premature ending that deserves Dorothy Parker’s comment at the funeral parlor, “The poor son of a bitch” (which echoes a comment by Owl Eyes in The Great Gatsby on the death of Jay Gatsby), there is much also that does not. Closely considered, the shape of Fitzgerald’s career, including its final Hollywood phase, does not correspond to the pattern of early success and later defeat and failure. Even as his body failed him, Fitzgerald was moving on to new themes and techniques, and he was not finally defeated as an artist.
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Fitzgerald reported for work at MGM’s Culver City studio on July 7, 1937, and tried with great intensity to become a professional scriptwriter. From his two previous experiences in Hollywood, he had derived firm ideas on the subject. He analyzed movies and scripts and studied the available techniques with a view to mastering them and improving on them, and above all he resolved to try to be “alone on the picture” instead of part of a team of writers. Ironically enough, the team-writing, mass-production approach had been developed and perfected by Irving Thalberg, the boy genius of MGM, dead at thirty-seven by the time Fitzgerald arrived at Culver City. Idealizing important aspects of Thalberg, Fitzgerald would make him a hero of American individualism in the novel he was working on at the time of his death, but it was Thalberg who had devised the team-writing system that Fitzgerald would never succeed in escaping.
Nor did Fitzgerald succeed, as he had hoped, in rising to the top of the movie industry. He did, however, work on a dozen MGM scripts and was one of MGM’s highest-paid writers. His special poetic powers did not translate to the screen, and he was much less adapted to film writing than a polished Hollywood professional like his old friend Donald Ogden Stewart. Still, during his year-and-a-half at MGM, he earned some $85,000, more than at any comparable period in his life. He made progress on repaying his debts to his publisher, Scribner’s, and to his agent, Harold Ober, and he maintained Zelda and his daughter Scotty. He did not live extravagantly in Hollywood, but he and Sheilah Graham had quiet good times, eating in good restaurants and taking trips to Santa Barbara and La Jolla.
When MGM failed to renew his contract, he turned to freelance screenwriting and began to produce short stories, most of which he sold to Esquire, including the seventeen Pat Hobby stories. Between November 1939 and July 1941, seven months after his death, a new Fitzgerald story appeared in every issue of Esquire. On the whole, the Pat Hobby stories are minor Fitzgerald, but several are first-rate, and in the figure of the broken-down screenwriter—perhaps inspired in part by Charlie Chaplin’s tramp—Fitzgerald found a new note of wry comedy. Hobby, an illiterate fall guy, is by no means a self-portrait of Fitzgerald but a genuine invention akin to the comic creations of Hollywood’s great clowns.
Now in his early forties, Fitzgerald was changing as an artist, no longer able to write about sensitive young love and the aspirations rooted in adolescence. “I have a daughter,” he wrote to Kenneth Littauer, the editor of Collier’s, some time during the summer of 1939. “She is very smart; she is very pretty; she is very popular. Her problems seem to me to be utterly dull and her point of view completely uninteresting.” Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda saying that their early love had provided the emotional inspiration for his work, and that the feeling must have been intense because it lasted so long for him as an artist. The implication is that he must now turn to other emotions for his work, and we see these beginning to emerge in his most interesting screenplay, the 74-page script for Madame Curie. He worked on this between November 1938 and January 1939, dealing for the first time with a figure whose heroism is inseparable from work and genuine achievement.
Fitzgerald’s earlier heroic figures had been essentially men and women of leisure, either sensitive adolescents or men whose work was subordinate to the more serious matters of feeling, like Dexter Green in the story “Winter Dreams,” or Gatsby, or men whose careers had been explicitly abandoned for love, as in the case of Dick Diver (Tender Is the Night). But in the young Madame Curie, Fitzgerald projected a heroism that is essentially a part of the adult world of achievement, and in the story of the two Curies, Fitzgerald engaged for the first time the adult world of love and of achievement based upon professional commitment. Though the movie, planned for Greta Garbo, was shelved until 1943, when it appeared with a screenplay by Paul Osborne and Paul Rameau, with Greer Garson in the title role, Fitzgerald’s screenplay marks an important transition for him as an artist.
The reasons for this new development are plain enough. Fitzgerald, as part of the movie industry, was working for the first time in his life at something other than personal expression. He was also in love with Sheilah Graham, and he admired her success as a journalist. It is also likely that the experience of the 1930’s and of the Depression had moved him to a new appreciation of the value of work and achievement. The apparently indelible image of Fitzgerald as a hopeless drunk and hack is a false one. He did have several epic benders during this period—in Encino, in Havana with Zelda, in New York and in Hanover, New Hampshire, while working on the movie Winter Carnival with Budd Schulberg—the last of which landed him in a hospital and may have shortened his life. But he was sober most of the time in Hollywood. According to Sheilah Graham, he was drinking during nine of the forty-two months they were together. Despite the lapses, it is fair to say that he himself embodied his new conception of the hero as foreshadowed in the Madame Curie script, the hero as romantic professional.
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Viewed in the context of Fitzgerald’s career as a writer, The Last Tycoon may be seen as his 1940’s novel, and it marks a change in his relationship to America and its history. Gatsby was his 1920’s novel, with its themes of aspiration and magical transformation and with the towering figure of T.S. Eliot in the background. Tender Is the Night was his 1930’s novel, with its Spenglerian vision of the collapse of the West and the disintegration of capitalism against a background of revolution and the rise of the dictators, and its implicit view that America was joined with Europe in a common doom whose roots lay in a vast historical violation. But in spirit The Last Tycoon is very much a novel of the 1940’s, and perhaps also the decade after that. Fitzgerald began writing it as the figure of Adolf Hitler loomed increasingly large over the continent of Europe; by the time of his death, Norway and France had fallen and Hitler was at the English Channel. Fitzgerald followed the war news intently, and planned to cover the conflict on the scene, not leaving the war to Hemingway (as he put it). It is in the context of these apocalyptic events that Fitzgerald makes his last hero, Monroe Stahr, a Jew—surely an American defiance of what was happening on the European continent.
Monroe Stahr, indeed, is one of the most compelling Jewish figures in American fiction, all the more remarkably because of the differences in background between Fitzgerald, the Catholic Midwesterner and at least social anti-Semite, and Irving Thalberg, the Jewish boy from working-class New York on whom Stahr is modeled. Stahr, the risen Jew, becomes the “last” American—but perhaps not at all paradoxically. Putting aside his reservations about Irving Thalberg as a Hollywood production executive, which he expressed in the story “Crazy Sunday,” Fitzgerald invested Stahr—like the Irish-Catholic Fitzgerald, a shooting star—with the trappings of mythic immortality:
He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings, when he was young. And while he was up there he looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously—finally frantically—and keeping on beating them, he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth.
This is an extraordinary passage in its context in the novel. To define his sense of Stahr, the star, Fitzgerald has used not only the legend of Icarus but also Milton’s Christ, who was taken up onto the mountain by Satan to view “all the kingdoms.” With Hitler looming over the European continent in 1939 and 1940, Fitzgerald’s pessimism was changing to something very different. Fitzgerald fused his own sense of himself with Stahr, the Jew, and with his transformed idea of America, which in 1939-40 looked much better to Fitzgerald than it had in the 1934 Tender Is the Night.
In a note lying between the pages of his Last Tycoon manuscript, he wrote:
I look out on it and I think it is the most beautiful history in the world. It is the history of me and my people. And if I came here yesterday like Sheilah I should still think so. It is the history of all aspiration—not just the American dream but the human dream and if I came at the end of it that too is a place in the line of pioneers.
It is fair to say that the fall of Europe had sharpened his feeling for the value of America, and that he had recovered an earlier sense of the validity of the American dream.
Fitzgerald also looked over his shoulder as he wrote at his arch-rival, Ernest Hemingway. He was aware that For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he had privately derided as Hemingway’s Rebecca or A Tale of Two Cities, had sold almost a half-million copies by the fall of 1940. For The Last Tycoon, he wrote in his Notebooks,
I want to write scenes that are frightening and inimitable. I don’t want to be as intelligible to my contemporaries as Ernest who as Gertrude Stein said is bound for the museums. I am sure that I am enough ahead to have some small immortality if I can keep well.
His competition with Hemingway was alive when he reminded himself in a note about his treatment of the figure of Kathleen: “Where will the warmth come from in this. Why does he think she’s warm? Warmer than the voice in Farewell [Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms].” With The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald, who shrewdly saw the deterioration of Hemingway’s art, meant to write a novel that would reestablish him at the top of his profession, and he made steady progress on it.
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Fitzgerald’s new emotions regarding America had been reinforced by his passing acquaintance with Irving Thalberg. He met Thalberg in 1927, when working on the movie Lipstick for United Artists, and had reported to Thalberg on his second Hollywood assignment in 1931 to work for MGM on Red-Headed Woman. But Thalberg became available as a heroic figure to Fitzgerald only after his death at thirty-seven in 1936; in retrospect, he evolved into Fitzgerald’s final metaphor.
Thalberg’s career, as Fitzgerald now viewed it, combined poetry and work, art and a major industry. The son of a Brooklyn lace merchant, he had been a frail and sickly child, but like Faust or Icarus or even Theodore Roosevelt he had recreated and willed his own being. At age seventeen, after a night-school business course, Thalberg got a job as a stenographer in the New York offices of Universal Pictures, where he caught the attention of the company president, Carl Laemmle, Sr., who made him his private secretary. Before he was twenty, Thalberg was running Universal’s Hollywood studio. He left Universal to run the L.B. Mayer studios, and in 1924—when Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby—Irving Thalberg at age twenty-five was put in charge of production at the newly formed Hollywood giant, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
It is thus clear that Irving Thalberg embodied some of Fitzgerald’s central themes, though it is not surprising that Thalberg’s widow Norma Shearer did not recognize her husband in Fitzgerald’s Monroe Stahr. Fitzgerald was responding to the early success of another brilliant young man, born like himself near the birth of the century, who also stood for art and quality in the giant industry he had helped to consolidate. Thalberg was willing to lose money for MGM on experimental films that might pioneer new techniques, and he attracted the loyalty of American and European writers. It was Thalberg, with his succession of high-budget successes and his insistence on quality, who made Hollywood during the 1930’s one of the most glamorous places in the world.
Thalberg’s aspirations to quality were backed by executive genius. He was the first Hollywood executive to put the production of high-quality films on an assembly-line basis, a contradiction that supplies the fundamental conflict in Fitzgerald’s novel. Thalberg set a schedule of one “A” film per week, and met it. He brought original musicals to the screen, rivaling Broadway’s. In The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald came to terms with the Thalberg of mass production and team writing by subsuming these aspects under the idea of the heroic executive, and by making the conflict external to Monroe Stahr, who finds his genius thwarted by bureaucracy and by organized labor.
Irving Thalberg’s power as a heroic figure comes through clearly in a note Fitzgerald made for an episode in the first chapter of The Last Tycoon, reproduced almost exactly in the text of the projected novel. Fitzgerald recalled:
This will be based on a conversation that I had with Thalberg the first time I was alone with him in 1927, the day that he said a thing about railroads. As near as I can remember what he said was this:
We sat in the old commissary at Metro and he said, “Scottie, supposing there’s got to be a road through a mountain and . . . there seem to be a half-dozen possible roads . . . each one of which, so far as you can determine, is as good as the other. Now suppose you happen to be the top man, there’s a point where you don’t exercise the faculty of judgment in the ordinary way, but simply the faculty of arbitrary decision. You say, ‘Well, I think we will put the road there,’ and you trace it with your finger and you know in your secret heart, and no one else knows, that you have no reason for putting the road there rather than in several other different courses, but you’re the only person that knows that you don’t know why you’re doing it and you’ve got to stick to that and you’ve got to pretend that you know and that you did it for specific reasons, even though you’re utterly assailed by doubts at times as to the wisdom of your decision, because all these other possible decisions keep echoing in your ear. But when you’re planning a new enterprise on a grand scale, the people under you mustn’t ever know or guess that you’re in doubt, because they’ve all got to have something to look up to and they mustn’t ever dream that you’re in doubt about any decision. These things keep occuring [sic].”
At that point, some other people came into the commissary and sat down, and the first thing I knew there was a group of four and the intimacy of the conversation was broken, but I was very much impressed by the shrewdness of what he said—something more than shrewdness—by the largeness of what he thought and how he reached it by the age of twenty-six, which he was then.
As Fitzgerald’s friend, the screenwriter Charlie MacArthur, put it, working at MGM after Thalberg’s death was like “going to the Automat.” Without Thalberg, according to Bosley Crowther’s history of the giant studio, MGM had
lost its savor. . . . It became a mere mass-producing combine, a huge motion-picture dispensing machine. . . . The sense of an inspirational influence, a genius domus, the studio had had while he was there, even under the unit system, was gone. There was little or no sense of closeness or creative participation with [L.B.] Mayer who was now the supreme administrator. The air that emanated was one of remote authority.
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By May 1939 Fitzgerald had settled on the plan of writing a novel about Hollywood and had outlined the essential story in a long letter to Collier’s editor Kenneth Littauer, hoping for a large advance. The fact that he and Littauer were discussing an advance in the neighborhood of $15,000-120,000 for an unwritten novel is evidence of Fitzgerald’s estimate of his continuing market value, although the deal fell through when Littauer demanded more than the first 6,000 words Fitzgerald sent him as the basis for a decision.
The work we call The Last Tycoon exists only in fragmentary form. Among Fitzgerald’s papers at Princeton, five outline plans survive, all of which project a Gatsby-length novel of about 50,000 words. In his latest plan, Fitzgerald envisioned a novel of nine chapters—Gatsby had nine—consisting of thirty episodes and organized into a five-part structure. By the time of his death, Fitzgerald had reached midpoint in the plan and was working on episode seventeen, but at 44,000 words he had already written far beyond what his design called for. Whether he would have cut this material severely or revised his plan to produce a much longer novel, we cannot know.
The only published version of this work-in-progress, the one edited by Edmund Wilson in 1941, provides the basis for most critical commentary, and yet that edition is in important respects somewhat misleading. It gives a more finished impression than the state of Fitzgerald’s manuscript material really justifies. As Matthew Bruccoli has pointed out in a valuable study of the manuscripts, even Chapter 1 was to have undergone revision, and Edmund Wilson himself, in his capacity as editor, created “Chapters” 2 through 6 by forming them out of episodes Fitzgerald had not yet organized into chapters. From what we do possess, much that would have happened later in the novel remains unclear, and Fitzgerald had not even determined on a title. As a working title he used The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western; it was Wilson who chose The Last Tycoon, an exercise of good but nevertheless independent critical judgment.
As Matthew Bruccoli properly remarks, The Last Tycoon “is not really an ‘unfinished novel’ if that term describes a work that is partly finished. The only way to regard it is as material toward a novel.” Nevertheless, it is clear from what we do possess that Fitzgerald at the end of his life was not only writing with undiminished powers, but was changing in his emotional perspective and in his attitudes as an artist.
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Monroe Stahr, the last tycoon, is a new kind of Fitzgerald hero. He is a Jew and uneducated, but through sheer ability he has risen from an impoverished Bronx boyhood to complete dominance in a major American industry, perhaps in psychological terms the American industry; and he is both artist and entrepreneur, a startling fusion that abolishes the assumed hostility between the two roles and looks back to the Renaissance and even to Shakespeare, successful impresario of the Globe theater. Monroe Stahr is a Jewish Horatio Alger, and Fitzgerald’s attitude toward him is wholly positive. He is the star that corresponds to Gatsby’s moon; he rises, in America, against a darkening European backdrop of Götterdämmerung and Kristallnacht. When Fitzgerald considered calling this novel The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, he had it in mind to direct attention to the association of the American West with the idea of opportunity. Indeed, the use of the word “last” here has an ironic dimension. Monroe Stahr is not the “last” tycoon. His struggle with bureaucracy and with the labor organizers represents a permanent struggle between the creative individual and the anti-creative forces with which he must always contend. Fitzgerald planned to have his Icarus-like Stahr die, appropriately, in a plane crash, but the star of individual genius will rise again.
Unlike previous Fitzgerald heroes, Monroe Stahr lacks any seriously disabling moral weakness: Amory Blaine’s solipsism and snobbery (This Side of Paradise), Anthony Patch’s fecklessness (The Beautiful and Damned), Gatsby’s illusions, Dick Diver’s lack of moral toughness. Stahr is disciplined, and his demands on others are exceeded by his demands on himself. He is also notable as the only major Fitzgerald hero who is committed to his work, his profession; some of the best episodes of The Last Tycoon depict him dealing with the moment-by-moment problems that arise in the vast enterprise he is running. No doubt this represents a new moral maturity on Fitzgerald’s part. With Zelda and Scotty and his debts and his movie scripts, he had become a minor industrial executive himself; his financial balance sheets were very much a part of his moral reality. The importance of professional accomplishment here is indicated dramatically by a note Fitzgerald wrote about a projected scene in which Stahr is told by his doctors to quit work:
The idea fills Stahr with a horror that I must write a big scene to bring off. Such a scene as has never been written. The scene that to Stahr is the equivalent to that of an amorous man being told that he is about to be castrated. In other words, the words of the doctor fill Stahr with a horror that I must be able to convey to the laziest reader—the blow to Stahr and the utter unwillingness to admit that at this point, 35 years old, his body should refuse to serve him and carry on these plans which he has built up like a pyramid of fairy skyscrapers in his imagination.
He has survived the talkies, the Depression, carried his company over terrific obstacles and done it all with a growing sense of kingliness—of some essential difference which he could not help feeling between himself and the ordinary run of man and now from the mere accident of one organ of his body refusing to pull its weight, he is incapacitated from continuing. Let him go through every stage of revolt.
Stahr’s exhaustion and illness and approaching death reflect Fitzgerald’s sense of his own condition in 1939 and 1940. By the time Fitzgerald finished writing the material we have in Chapter 5, both he and Stahr were close to death, and there is something grimly heroic in Fitzgerald’s transmutation of his own mortality into art. “He was due to die very soon now,” Stahr’s doctor reflects to himself at the last examination. “Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing the cardiograms? You couldn’t persuade a man like Stahr to stop and lie down and look at the sky for six months.”
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Fitzgerald’s engagement with American history was deep and rooted, and in The Last Tycoon, as in Tender Is the Night, there are presidential presences. Monroe Stahr bears the name of James Monroe, the fifth President, whose Monroe Doctrine was a second declaration of independence from Europe and therefore a symbol of a reaffirmed, unique American destiny. Where Tender Is the Night views America and Europe as linked in a common decline, The Last Tycoon separates them as Europe undergoes the catastrophe of 1939-40 and America—one thinks of Fitzgerald’s great sentence, “America is a willingness of the heart”—becomes the hope of the West. In addition to the fifth President, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln are here as well. In the opening chapter, the Nick Carraway-like narrator, Cecilia Brady, daughter of a major Hollywood producer, is on her way home by plane from Bennington—itself a name with Revolutionary War overtones—when the plane is obliged by bad weather to land in Nashville. The screenwriter Wylie White takes Cecilia and the failed Hollywood executive Manny Schwartz to visit Andrew Jackson’s home, the Hermitage, which is near Nashville. “It was still not quite dawn. The Hermitage looked like a nice big white box, but a little lonely and vacated after a hundred years.”
It is impossible to know what Fitzgerald finally would have done with the Jackson motif in the finished novel, but he is clearly setting up an important zone of association here. Manny Schwartz, the once successful but now down-and-out movie executive, commits suicide at the Hermitage. “Manny Schwartz and Andrew Jackson,” reflects Cecilia Brady, “—it was hard to say them in the same sentence.” But Jackson in one of his historical/legendary aspects is a populist and a democrat, representing an American opportunity that is available to Schwartz as well as to Monroe Stahr. Cecilia goes on, reflecting about the suicide of Schwartz:
It was doubtful if he knew who Andrew Jackson was as he wandered around, but perhaps he figured that if people had preserved his house Andrew Jackson must have been someone who was large and merciful, able to understand. At both ends of life man needed nourishment: a breast—a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him, and shoot a bullet into his head.
Andrew Jackson in this novel seems to stand for the inevitable tensions between opportunity and failure. The very freedom that makes Stahr’s success possible—and indeed, Manny Schwartz’s earlier, more modest success—also includes the possibility of Schwartz’s failure and suicide. The Jackson presence here also seems to express a tender and elegiac but ambiguous sense of America. Wylie White says, “Old Hickory—America’s tenth President. The victor of New Orleans, opponent of the National Bank, and inventor of the spoils system.” Jackson is thus winner and loser, victor and source of corruption. He invented the spoils system: Stahr, as president of Hollywood, stood for high quality but also invented mass production and team writing. Within Fitzgerald’s encompassing affirmation there remain ambiguity and qualification, a moral perspective that can surely be described as intellectually mature.
When Cecilia Brady and her companions visit the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson, associated with the West and opportunity, has been dead for a hundred years. But Jackson’s spiritual heir, Monroe Stahr, is headed west, as far west as you can go on the continent, to Los Angeles in an airliner. Fitzgerald makes the frontier connection as Cecilia says about the airport at Nashville:
I suppose there has been nothing like airports since the days of the stage stops—nothing quite as lonely, as somber-silent. The old red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked—people didn’t get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes.
When Stahr, in a conversation with Cecilia during the resumed flight west, gives her his monogrammed ring, we are not surprised that it is described as being like a gold nugget, reminiscent of Sutter’s Mill, with the connecting initial “S”: “He handed it to me, a gold nugget with the letter S in bold relief.” And then suddenly we are there, in the West:
The motors were off, and all our five senses began to readjust themselves for landing. I could see a line of lights for the Long Beach Naval Station ahead and to the left, and on the right a twinkling blur for Santa Monica. The California moon was out, huge and orange over the Pacific.
Even though The Last Tycoon represents unfinished material, it is clear that Fitzgerald had never written with a greater power of evocation and suggestion. That California moon, huge and orange over the Pacific, is the descendant of the Gatsbyan moon of magical transformation, the moon of permanent American possibility, now rising over Hollywood instead of over Long Island.
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Abraham Lincoln is another presence in The Last Tycoon, along with Jackson and Monroe, but Lincoln’s significance is greatly changed from what it had been in Tender Is the Night. The British writer Boxley sees Stahr as Lincolnesque:
Boxley knew he could sit with Wylie White tonight at the Troc raging at Stahr, but he had been reading Lord Charnwood and he recognized that Stahr like Lincoln was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost single-handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade, to the point where the content of the “A productions” was wider and richer than that of the stage. Stahr was an artist only, as Mr. Lincoln was a general, perforce and as a layman.
The usefulness of the Lincoln legend here is obvious enough. Like Lincoln, Stahr rose from humble beginnings to a position of enormous responsibility. A Bronx tenement had been his log cabin. In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald had viewed Lincoln as a failure, his legacy a ruin; he had seen him, in effect, from the jaundiced perspective of the abortive Reconstruction, the corrupt Grant administration, and the democratic vulgarity of the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons. This is a perspective he shared with Henry Adams and Edmund Wilson (of the later Patriotic Gore); it is rooted at least in part in Fitzgerald’s sense of his own family’s history: his negative attitudes toward the commercially successful but parvenu Midwestern McQuillan side of his heritage, as compared with the “defeated” Maryland gentry and Francis Scott Key inheritance on his father’s side.
But in The Last Tycoon, in a manner undoubtedly reflecting Fitzgerald’s changed evaluation of America, the Lincoln-Monroe Stahr connection represents something distinctive and valuable in the American tradition. This is much more the Lincoln of Whitman than of Edmund Wilson, a Lincoln of American possibility. Indeed, The Last Tycoon at one point treats Fitzgerald’s earlier Spenglerian gloom with a gently dismissive irony. Stahr loves Kathleen Moore, an Englishwoman based on Sheilah Graham. She tells him about a former lover, clearly based on Fitzgerald himself:
But the man I told you about knew everything and he had a passion for educating me. He made out schedules and made me take courses at the Sorbonne and go to museums. I picked up a little.
What was he?
He was a painter of sorts and a hell-cat. And a lot besides. He wanted me to read Spengler—everything was for that. All the history and philosophy and harmony was all so I could read Spengler, and then I left him before we got to Spengler. At the end I think that was the chief reason he didn’t want me to go.
In this novel, indeed, Fitzgerald seems to regard his earlier pessimism as sentimental, and gently mocks it. He also seems to recover his sense of artistic security in relation to Ernest Hemingway. There is now no more talk of the “authority of failure.” And he takes a final playful dig at his great rival. The writer Wylie White, a drunk, at one point speaks of “all this brave gloom,” and comments on some café-society types that “the only way to keep their self-respect is to be Hemingway characters.”
To be sure, Fitzgerald intended that Stahr, weakened and ill, humiliated in his conflict with a Communist labor organizer, would die in a plane crash. But the ending was not to express a sense of ultimate defeat. “Unlike Tender Is the Night,” he had written to Kenneth Littauer in 1939, “it is not the story of deterioration—it is not depressing and not morbid in spite of the tragic ending.” Fitzgerald apparently planned to end with an affirmation. In a preliminary note he observed:
The epilogue can model itself quite fairly on the last part of Gatsby . . . and I think I’ll do my own method of ending probably on a high note about Stahr but that will solve itself in the writing. And toward the end I’ll tend to go into a certain cadenced prose.
Stahr’s illness and death were evidently not intended to detract from our sense of his achievement or from the American possibility he represented.
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Of course we will never know what this novel in its completed form would have been. Fitzgerald’s final outline projects a good deal of plot complication, involving labor disputes and conflict at the studio, and also an episode in which Stahr is “sick in Washington.” No doubt this would have involved further elaboration of the presidential themes adumbrated earlier. But no one can know. What we do have of The Last Tycoon, notes and drafts really, is very good. There is an aesthetic of the fragmentary, of the torn page, the shred of textile, the unfinished portrait or unfinished symphony which in certain moods we can view as apt comments on the universal human condition; The Last Tycoon partakes of that aesthetic.
Hemingway read Edmund Wilson’s edition of The Last Tycoon, and in a letter to Maxwell Perkins (November 15, 1941) dealt with it harshly:
I read all of Scott’s book and I don’t know whether to tell you what I truly think. There are very fine parts in it, but most of it has a deadness that is unbelievable. I think Bunny Wilson did a very creditable job in explaining, sorting, padding, and arranging. But you know Scott would never have finished it with that gigantic, preposterous outline of how it was to be. I thought the part about Stahr was all very good. You can recognize Irving Thalberg, his charm and skill and grasp of business, and the sentence of death over him. But the women were pretty preposterous. Scott had gotten so far away from any knowledge of people that they are very strange. He still had the technique and the romance of doing anything, but all the dust was off the butterfly’s wing even though the wing would still move up until the butterfly was dead.
Hemingway here may still have been pursuing his rivalry with Fitzgerald, struggling to be or remain number one, for in an assessment of Fitzgerald he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in April 1951 he said that “The Last Tycoon is very good,” even while expressing doubt that Fitzgerald had been capable of finishing it. From what we do have of it, however, it seems clear that though Fitzgerald’s health was failing as he worked on this novel, he had by no means failed as an artist; indeed, he was continuing to develop.
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